The Unfairfolk (Valenbound Book 1)

by Sara Wolf

  My footsteps echo down the empty halls, the eyes of the paintings and statues watching me. The only thing scarier than school is a quiet school. And the only thing scarier than an old, beautiful building is an old, beautiful, ghost-town-fuckin’-empty building. Every shadow feels huge, every wood-creak feels like a threat.

  “Okay. So.” I back up. “This was a mistake.”

  Being outside is better than being the last person left on Earth, so I shuffle out to the lawn, meandering aimlessly towards the pool. It’s also mega-abandoned, the surface calm as glass and the eternally-heated water radiating curls of steam into the cold air. We’re technically not allowed near it unless there’s a lifeguard present, but technical things've always put me to sleep. There’s no cameras around here, so I hop the fence with little effort and get kinda disappointed - not even barbed wire at the top? You can’t spit in LA without hitting a fence with barbed wire. Unless you’re in the rich people zones. And then the barbed wire magically transmogrifies into cops.

  I peel my shoes and socks off and sink into the clear water - the warmth spreading up from my soles and into my actual soul. The walk here wasn’t too bad, but my knee makes painful pangs of protestation anyway. I get up and walk over to the shallower end of the pool, hiking my jeans up as far as they’ll go. The water comes up to my mid-thigh, and I almost black out with how good the warmth feels on my knee.

  “Ohhh yeah,” I sigh. “That’s the chlorinated stuff.”

  If I face away from Knight Durand and ignore the woods, it’s all kinda…peaceful. Standing here in clear blue water, looking up at a clear blue sky. There’s not a cloud out today, the mountain peaks sharp and crisp and brilliant with snow. A single jetline cuts the sky in two - pale and long and fading rapidly with the wind. I look down at my palm. The blood-promise wound across my hand is gone now; the faintest lace-white line where it was. A scar. My first. Well, second, if you count the scar tissue in my knee. But you can’t see that stuff. Silvere’s nurse was nice - too nice like Mom - and when she took the bandage off my hand for the last time she apologized for the scar, but I told her not to. Kinda glad it left one. A reminder. A lesson not to demand things before I’m really ready for them.

  Because I’ll ruin everything.

  I run my hand through the silky water, Von Arx’s furious glare, and then her furious glare behind the gold beaked mask. Maybe.

  “I don’t get it,” I mutter at the pool pump. “If she hates me so much, why didn’t she just expel me? Call my mom and have her come pick me up? Nothing’s stopping her; she’s the freakin’ headmistress. She can do anything she wants…right?”

  The pool pump gurgles a little, but says nothing. Maybe she can’t refund the money Will’s given her, or some fine print shit like that. She’s not even around enough to wonder after anymore - four days after her screaming fit, she went on an ‘emergency business trip’, and I haven’t seen her office window with the lettuce growing in it open ever since. Which means the gold beaked mask person couldn’t’ve been her.

  ‘Course it wasn’t her, Lilith. You saw the camera footage. It was a dream.

  The pool shudders just then - ripples hitting me. Ripples that aren’t mine.

  I’ve panicked enough by now to pinpoint every sudden change as fear takes hold; heartbeat slows, lungs get heavy, hot magma and ice slush battle in my veins, seeds of nausea sprout sickly. I see it - something dark, deep beneath the surface of the water, waiting. Moving up. No way. No fuckin’ way. The red-eyed guy can’t be - he can’t -

  I pinch my leg hard, trying to cut the nightmare off at the pass this time, but all there is is the pain. All there is is me diving for the shallow end, for the stairs out, away from him, from the song I never want to hear, from a song that, if he sings it, means the end of the world -

  The water explodes, a shape exploding up with it. Human. Dark hair. Green eyes.

  Wait.

  I blink. “Prickland?”

  He wipes away the hair sticking in his surprised face. “Pierce?”

  The relief is almost enough to have me ignoring his very wet and very bare chest. “Holy shit. I thought you were Jaws, dude!”

  His eyes go flat. “How would a shark even get in a pool?”

  “Uh, the drain, connected to the ocean? Duh?”

  “Pool drains are not directly connected to the ocean.”

  “Fine, ghost shark, then!”

  “This place is off limits.” He swims over to the side of the pool and effortlessly hefts himself out.

  “Y-You’re not supposed to be here either!” I splutter, motioning at the empty lifeguard seat.

  “I have permission,” He argues, toweling his sopping hair.

  “From who? Your grandma? FYI: she’s been AFK for like a week, my guy.” I pause. “Wait - you weren’t even swimming. You were just…sitting down there. Doing what?”

  “Practicing.”

  “For what?” I sniff. “Little Mermaid auditions?”

  “Why are you here?” He turns the tables on me and holds up a finger. “If I don’t like your answer, you’ve got detention for the rest of the week.”

  “Whatever happened to democracy?” I mumble, clambering out of the pool and tugging my jean cuffs back down. I flop on a pool chair to pull my converse back on.

  “Why are you here?” He presses heartlessly.

  “Because!” I throw my arms out. “Everybody else went to the village. I tried to stay inside and do regular things with my life but it got real haunted mansion on me real fast. So I came out here. To nature.”

  Alistair’s quiet as he pulls his shirt on, much to the dismay of the two hundred squealing girls who aren’t here right now, and for a flicker of an unimaginable second I get it - the guy’s shoulderblades are like fuckin’ sawblades. His eyebrows suddenly knot up in the middle.

  “Are you doing that thinking thing again?” I ask.

  “About how long and terrible your detention’s going to be this time?” He inquires lightly. “Yes.”

  “I love nature.” I change the subject. “Don’t you? Dudes are always like, ‘You should smile more!’ to me, and I’m like, ‘Sorry random man, but I only smile at nature and babies’. You know?”

  He slips into a pair of the standard issue pool sandals they give us, and I watch his glare flicker to my knee. Don’t.

  “But not toddlers,” I correct. “Those things are way too sticky.”

  “You visited the village your first week,” He suddenly says. “And you were excited about it.”

  “How do you know I was excited?” I sniff. “Maybe I had to shit. The expressions are very similar.”

  “Lionel said you wouldn’t stop wiggling in your seat.”

  “Again, maybe I had to -”

  “What happened?” Alistair interrupts. “In the village that day?”

  I glower and shrug. “Just get Lionel to tell you. He tells you everything else, apparently.”

  “I’d rather hear it from you.”

  “And I’d rather have an In-n-Out strawberry milkshake, but here we are.”

  Alistair looks at me for a second, eyelashes heavy with water, and then he turns and disappears into the changing room. I fold my arms grumpily. How fuckin’ dare Lionel. First he doesn’t tell me he’s in a cult, now this. I’m his client, right? Will’s his employer! Isn’t he supposed to, like, keep my secrets? I get that him and Alistair are tight, but seriously? C’mon! A little voice nags that he only told Alistair because he was worried about me, but what-the-fuck-ever. Alistair Strickland, of all people in this tax-evasion-scheme of a school, doesn’t need to be informed of where or when I freak out.

  Oh, shit. If Lionel told Alistair, he definitely told Will and Mom, right? Oh shit shit shit shit -

  Something warm and metallic bonks lightly against my forehead. I wince back and look up to see Alistair standing over me, properly dressed now in sweats and a windbreaker, a can of some drink in his hand.

  “It’s no milkshake,” He start
s. “But it’s the best I could do.”

  He’s close. Bergamot and chlorine and freckle-on-his-neck close.

  “I don’t want it.”

  “I already paid for it. And I hate milk. Take it.”

  If it’ll make him back up, I’ll do anything.

  “What even -” I take it, careful not to touch our fingers together. I tilt the can around in my hand - it’s weirdly warm. “What even is this? All the writing’s in…uh…”

  “Japanese,” He says. “There’s a vending machine in the boy’s changing rooms.”

  “Why only the boy’s?”

  He sighs. “I liked them when I was younger. Grandmother had it installed as a present.”

  “Wow. Spoiled, much?” I pop the can open, the smell of sweet milk and fake strawberry. He pops his own can open - the adorable cartoon coffee bean on the front the only clue as to what it is. I take a hesitant sip. Yup - pure sugar. But not in a bad way.

  “This is good, actually,” I marvel. Alistair looks up, and for a second I don’t think it’s him. Because it can’t be him. The Alistair Strickland I know doesn’t smile. Like that. Or at all. I mean yeah, he smiles at his grandma. But not like this; his jaw and his eyebrows and his sad, dour mouth pulled up, all the way up, in a full blown smile. It’s not bright. Not like Ciel. It’s not cheery like Ana’s, or boisterous like Rafe’s. It’s his own, a little crooked and a little blunt and all him.

  “Yeah,” He agrees softly.

  “You -” I cough milk. “You’re smiling.”

  His lips straight-lace themselves down again. “No I’m not.”

  “Were too! Who knew, Prickland’s face can move-”

  “Drop it.”

  “Gonna throw me in detention if I tell people you aren’t lumpy-grumpy all the time?”

  “Pierce.”

  “Finnnne. Your secret’s safe with me. But conditional, wherein you continue to feed me these milk thingies.” I sip and watch as Alistair stares into his canned coffee. Doesn’t drink it. Just stares. “Not even coffee, huh?”

  His eyes flash up at me. “What?”

  “You don’t even drink in front of people. Unless it’s water.”

  There’s a quiet, the wind emptily clinking the lock on the pool’s gate against the chainlink. He’s not going to answer me. This shit is private -

  “Water’s easy to see. Easy to taste.” His voice is so unexpected I jump a little. “It’s clear, so you can see powder in it, unless someone’s taken the time to dissolve it all thoroughly. And there are very few poisons tasteless enough to disguise themselves in water.”

  I try to scrounge up something to say. How do you even live like that, thinking about poison all the time -

  “She told you, didn’t she?” Alistair asks. “Von Arx.”

  I nod, stiff. “But I noticed before that.”

  “Of course you did,” He scoffs, but for once the sound doesn’t burn going down. The wind picks up, howling, every flower in the distant rose maze shivering their petals. I clutch the warm milk closer.

  “Listen,” Alistair finally starts. “You tell me what happened in the village. And I tell you what I was doing in the pool. Deal?”

  “You won’t believe me,” I shoot.

  “I can’t believe what you won’t tell me.” He fires back.

  “Why is talking to you like talking to a pincushion with all the pins facing out?”

  Alistair graces me with the staring-too-hard bit, but I head him off at the pass.

  “There’s a man who’s been following me. I saw him in a restaurant in LA before I came here, and again in Saint-Verde’s church. Dark hair, dark eyes, except sometimes they turn red - ”

  “Bloodshot?” Alistair asks, without missing a beat. He’s supposed to scoff. Tell me I’m crazy. Not act like it could be maybe-real.

  “No. The irises, I guess. They turn bright red.”

  “He sings, doesn’t he? Or tries to.”

  Ice crawls up my spine. “How do you know -”

  He looks up from his coffee can. Slowly. “I’ve seen him too.”

  “When?”

  “Just once. Yesterday,” he says. “Standing under a tree, on the edge of the forest.”

  He points, and I follow his finger.

  “That’s -”

  “Knight Durand.” Alistair finishes. And it goes unsaid - the exact trees where Rose drew the monster in my notebook. Where the circle of mushrooms are. Fairy ring. I can’t move. I can’t feel my body enough to move, anymore.

  “This is crazy,” I laugh, but Alistair just nurses his coffee.

  “I told you, I’ve heard singing before this. Rose’s drawings, where the shadow creatures would be.”

  “You’re not - You’re not saying they’re the same thing?”

  “Thing. No. Person? Maybe.”

  “You swear you heard the red-eyed man sing?”

  “He opened his mouth like he was about to. I don’t know how I knew he was going to sing, instead of just saying something. Maybe it was because he inhaled so large. But I ran before he could get the notes out. I was…” He pauses, knuckles subtly white around the can, and then his eyes flicker up to me. “He had an effect on me. Somehow.”

  “You’ve gotta be more specific, Prickland.”

  “I can’t. Not with you.”

  I blink. “What does that even mean?”

  “You’re not -“ He inhales, and inhales again. “You and I -”

  A pause, the coffee can spiraling steam over his face.

  “You can say whatever you want,” I insist. “I don’t care.”

  “You don’t exactly strike me as the type to keep secrets without payment.”

  “I can. I do. All the fuckin’ time. I’m deeper than I look.”

  “Still not very deep, then,” He sighs.

  “I haven’t blabbed about your family poisoning you, or whatever. And I’m not gonna blab about this. You wanna blood promise on it?”

  He leans against the chainlink fence. “No.”

  The pool laps against the concrete. Neither of us move, or breathe too deep.

  “I’m just…” I trail off and mutter-laugh. “I’m just glad. That someone else’s seen him, too. I thought it was just me - I thought I was going crazy, alone. So. Thanks. For telling me this. Or, you know. Anything at all.”

  The cold air throbs around us, the wind whistling back and forth. He believes me. It’s happening to someone else. I’m not alone. It’s weird - I can practically see his armor come off. Not all the way off. That’ll maybe never happen in his whole lifetime. But the way his shoulders sag a little, the way his chest deflates from staying high and strong -

  “That red-eyed man…he did something to me. It was like…” Alistair pauses, sucking in. “It was like my whole body was being compelled to be afraid, whether or not I wanted to be. It was like I had no choice - like I wasn’t in control of my own emotions. Like he was putting fear directly into my brain.”

  “He did that to me, too! I panic like a fuckin’ rabbit in a cage every time I see him -“

  “It’s different for me.” He interrupts. “I’m always in control of my emotions. Always.”

  “I mean…not always,” I half-laugh nervously, because he obviously must be joking. He looks up from the coffee can, eyes like a wrought iron gate.

  “Always.”

  “But, uh, nobody’s like that. Nobody can be -”

  “I have to be. Or else bad things happen to the people I care about.”

  “Like who?” I stop. “Rose?”

  He doesn’t say anything, and I get the feeling it’s the closest I’ll come to a ‘yes’. Something in my chest twists, hard, but I force my brain to stay on topic.

  “There’s no way. But. When he was about to sing, did you get this feeling…a feeling like the world was going to end if you heard it?”

  A beat. He frowns. And then; “Exactly. A feeling like everything was going to end.”

  Crazy. Crazy crazy crazy. Th
is can’t be happening. Alistair presses on, fearless. Or at least less fear than me.

  “If I hadn’t run away from the song, if I’d heard it, I’m positive it’d be the same song I’ve heard before, from the shadows in Rose’s drawings. She drew those shadows with red eyes. That man had red eyes, too.”

  “They can’t be the same thing. It’s a hallucination.” I hear myself like I’m far away, out of my body, riding high and ramping up to hysterical.

  “Strange, then,” Alistair muses. “That both of us are hallucinating the exact same thing. The exact same feeling.”

  “People’s eyes don’t turn red.”

  “I know.” Alistair agrees calmly.

  “Then what is he?” My voice cracks. Alistair’s throat bobs.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why are we the only ones who can see him?”

  “I don’t know, Pierce.”

  I weave my fingers together around the milk can like it’ll save me. Stop me from spinning off the edge.

  “Do you think…do you think it had something to do with the blood promise?”

  He’s silent. The wind shudders over the pool’s surface, turning glass to skin.

  “Whoever he is,” Alistair starts quietly. “I’ll stop him. He won’t touch you here - you’re safe.”

  “Your uncle saw him, too. He wasn’t safe.”

  Alistair’s brow shoots up. “What?”

  “Before he disappeared. Your uncle, Julien. There’s a priest in the village who knew him. He told me Julien saw ‘a man with eyes like hellfire’ before he went missing. Sound familiar?”

  “My uncle didn’t disappear. He was kidnapped,” He insists. “You’re not going to disappear, Pierce. And no one is going to kidnap you on my watch.”

  “What about you?” I press. “Who’s gonna watch you?”

  “I can watch myself.”

  Pride wades through the fear, and I lift my chin. “So can I.”

  He doesn’t say anything. With shaking hands, I drink. Strawberry and milk and blood from the inside of my bitten mouth. Breathe, Lilith. Cold chlorine air, in and out. He’s right. There’s security in Silvere. The village didn’t have security. Neither did the restaurant. Red-eye can get on campus, maybe, but he can’t come into the buildings. He can’t. Not like the deer did. He’s not a harmless deer. He’s not a dream. He’s a person. There are cameras, disguised like gold orbs. Dozens of them, maybe hundreds. Someone will see him. Stop him. I breathe until I’m calm enough to make words again.